Introduction

The goal of this analysis is to investigate what services in Toronto need improvements. Specifically we want to investigate what kind of services are people having trouble finding/ using and why they are having trouble, so we can provide some suggestions.

Our plan is to find out the following:

  1. What kind of services people are having the most trouble finding through the 211 service request.

  2. Why are people having trouble finding these services, what are some potential reasons that make it difficult to find/reach.

  3. What can be done to improve the service so people can more easily access them.

We want to understand what specific service people are having trouble finding using the data provided by 211 service request. With that information we can then investigate the availability of such service in the city using the data from the government to determine wheather or not it is the root cause. Finally we will provide some recommendations as to how this service can be improved to provide citizens a better experience when finding such service.

Data

To answer the question above, we will be using data provided by Findhelp Information Services on their 211 service requests as well as open data found on the City of Toronto and statistics Canada’s website. The data from 211 service requests contain information about the kind of service a requestee is making, their location, demographic, and whether or not their need was met during the call(e.g. if there is a service available to the requestee). This data will provide us insight on what kind of services are people having the most trouble with, and we can find more about the services through some external data to determine what are the potential problems that lead to people having trouble using them. The kind of external data we use will come from the government of Canada, specifically from the City of Toronto open data portal, where information will be the most reliable and relevant to our investigation.

Analysis

Determining what service needs improvement

To answer the first question:

Q1. What kind of services people are having the most trouble finding through the 211 service request

We will use the following plots generated from the 211 service request data. We have extracted the data where a requestee’s need was not met during the call and grouped them by their service category. Then we inspect the subcategories of such service to determine what exactly is giving people the most trouble to find.

The first plot showed that Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Services has the highest rate of unmet, and specifically Detoxification is the major culprit that causes the high rate as shown in the second plot. Since the data from 211 service requests did not specify what kind of detoxification(drug or alcohol), we will assume that drug detoxification is more common in this case.

Conclusion for Q1: With the above information, we can see that detoxification is by far the most common service that people are have trouble with finding. This tell us detoxification is a major area that needs improvemnt in Toronto, and we will focus on the potential root cause of it, and it can be improved.

Potential Causes for High Rate of Unmet

To answer the second question:

Q2. Why are people having trouble finding these services, what are some potential reasons that make it difficult to find/reach

First, we want to take a look at the requestees location. We suspect that one likely reason could be the lack of available services in the requestees’ location.

The following graph is generated using the 211 service request data. To reduce the clutter in the bar graph, we grouped the postal code by the first 2 characters. We extracted the location of detoxification requests and mapped them. The graphs below give us a rough idea of where requestees are from, but this is a rather small sample size as many requestees did not provide a postal code to Findhelp Information Services to record.

The following data is extracted from the City of Toronto Open Data with a listing of non-profit substance use treatment services(can be found on https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/wellbeing-youth-substance-use-treatment/). The dataset contains information such as the name of the agency, the location(address and postal code), along with the service information such as the description of the service, eligibility, and application. According to the data catalog description, it is also the information collected and used by Findhelp. We have extracted the total available treatment service locations by the first two characters of postal code and mapped their location by the first 3 characters of the postal code.

As shown above, most of the substance use treatment services are located in the M5 and M6 area, which would mostly be the Downtown Toronto and York area. With the number of substance use treatment services available, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious issue with availability compared to the previous graphs. However, if we include all detoxification requests(including the ones without postal code), there is potentially an issue with these services not having enough capacity to accept more people, as these treatments can take several months. With a further look into the service eligibility and description, it is also apparent that not all treatment services are easily accessible. Some of these services are only available to youth(colored in blue in the map), some of them require a referral, and some of them are only for the homeless. If we narrow the services down to the ones that can be used by adults, we have the following list of agencies:

With only 24 non-profit treatment services available to adults(colored in red, some are overlapped as they are in the same postal area), and some require a referral or prior assessment, it is likely the cause of the high rate of unmet from the requestees through the 211 helplines.

Conclusion for Q2: Even with limited information regarding the locations of detoxification service requests, we were already able to see the potential issue of treatment centers being short supplied. We were able to find data that are used by 211 findhelp regarding the treatment service locations and found that not all of them are easily accessible. With these combined, it is likely the root cause of the high rate of unmet detoxification requests we see from Q1 above.

How can the service improve

Q3 What can be done to improve the service so people can more easily access them.

To better visualize the problem, we have overlaid the requestee’s locations with the map of treatment services that are available to adults from Q2, where the points in red are the location of the request and points in green are the service locations that are available to adults.

With this map and the previous analysis, it is obvious that these services are likely in short supply. Keep in mind that we were only able to map request locations that a requestee had provided, there are still over 5000 requests we did not have a location, of which 1225 of the requests’ need was not met(see appendix 3.1 and 3.2 for data). As a direct result, we suggest that we need more of these service centers in locations where demand is high.

Secondly, as mentioned previously, not all treatment services are easily accessible. Some of these services require a referral or prior assessment before they can even use them. Mental health services are commonly needed by adults. The government should also pay more attention to adults’ mental health healing needs and make them eligible for more services centers. Therefore we recommend not only to increase the number of service centers that are available to adults, but also have more that are walk-in, either for existing services to be more accessible or for new service centers to be walk-in.

Conclusion for Q3: With our investigation suggesting that service availability and accessibility being the main culprit for the high rate of service need unmet, we recommend that the city of Toronto should have more easily accessible substance treatment services in high demand areas such as Scarborough.

Summary

Upon analyzing the services requests data provided by the Findhelp information services, we noticed that “Mental and Substance Use Disorder Services” the most commonly unmet service request. Upon further digging, it was found out that detoxification services were most commonly unmet. Detoxification requests are by far the most significant requests that were unmet, almost the same rate as all other types of services combined (appendix 5). Once we learnt that detoxification being the most difficult to find, we compared the available detoxification service location with the locations of the requestees. We noticed that most requests were made within downtown Toronto and surrounding areas. Although the areas surrounding downtown Toronto had a similar or higher number of service requests to it, there was significantly less number of service locations. Furthermore, most locations focused on younger populations and required referral or assessment from CAMH. This would add to the complications for accessing the required services. We concluded that these factors combined to cause the number of detoxification services requests not being met, and we suggest that Toronto needs more substance treatment services that are more easily accessible(walk-in, no referral or prior assessment) to the general public.

Appendix

1

The following data consist of all Mental health services is found in the city of Toronto open data(https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/wellbeing-youth-mental-health/). All of these services do not have any classification, we checked how many of the services have the word “substance” or “addiction” in their service description:

2.1

The following is all the requestees location by the first 3 characters of the postal code.

2.2

The following is all the requestees’ location by the first 2 characters of the postal code.

3.1

The following shows the total detoxification request that did not provide a postal code.

3.2

The following shows the total detoxification request that did not provide a postal code and their need was not met.

4

A link to the list of postal codes of Canada starts with M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_of_Canada:_M

5

The total number of need unmet compared between detoxification and all other services.

6

The following dataset comes from ODESI and consists of data for “Canadian Tobacco, Alcohol and Drugs Survey, 2017: Person file” (https://search2.odesi.ca/#/details?uri=%2Fodesi%2FCTADS-82M0020-E-2017-person.xml)

The dataset contains 407 variables thus we will not list them here, but overall the dataset contains information about the usage of tobacco, alcohol, and drugs in households. It includes how people obtain their substance and reasons for using them.

We have attempted to find more information on what kind of detoxification service (what kind of substance treatment) should Toronto provide using the data. However, after some investigation, we found that while the data provided us what kind of substance is being used most, it also seems that a lot of people have no intent to stop using the substance or they believe it does not cause them any issue in their life. Therefore we were not able to find further information using the dataset and thus was not included in our analysis.

Below is only a preview of the dataset(10 entries only)